The invention relates to improved methods and apparatus for making pleated draperies, and especially to methods and apparatus that avoid the difficulties associated with use of prior pleat marking machines and prior fan folding machines and techniques.
In the drapery industry, a drapery with a type of pleat called a "French Pleat" is well established as the most popular type. A drapery having French pleats is able to maintain a regulated "fullness" when covering a window and, when the drape is opened, to cover a minimum amount of window and/or wall space. Unfortunately, draperies with French pleats are time consuming to manufacture, and hence are expensive. In order to understand why, it will be helpful to briefly describe the state of the art for manufacture of "standard" draperies with French pleats. As most people know, French pleated draperies have sewn in pleats along their top borders. Drapery hooks are installed in the pleats to allow the draperies to be hung from a drapery rod assembly. Normally, standard draperies are manufactured from an integral number of standard sized "panels" or "widths" of fabric. Therefore, the size of the section of fabric including an integral number of panels "serged" or sewn together does not usually precisely match the "fullness" to correspond to a particular rod size to which the drapery is to be attached or hung. In the usual French pleat manufacturing processes, a machine called a "pleat marker" is used in order to get the proper number of pleats of proper "fullness". The "fullness" of the drapery is a composite measure of the spacing between the pleats and the amount of fabric in each pleat, for a particular section of fabric containing an integral number of panels. The pleat marking machine is attached to the top surface of a table referred to as a "tabling" table, on which the drapery is laid out adjacent to the pleat marking machine. A worker then lays the buckram across the top of the drape and refers to a reference book that indicates a setting to be made on the pleat marking machine for a particular fullness of drapery being manufactured. This allows the machine to be set so that a plurality of laterally slidable, equally spaced devices referred to as pleat markers are equally spaced along one edge of the drapery fabric. Later, if a wider piece of fabric is to be pleat marked, the spacing between pleats will be different than the spacing for a narrower piece of fabric after adjustment of the pleat marking machine to the wider width piece of fabric. After the pleat marking machine has been properly set, a worker uses a marker to make pleat sewing marks on the fabric, using the pleat markers as guides. Note that these pleat marking machines mark where the pleats are to be sewn, not the center of the pleat. The foregoing pleat marking procedure is very time-consuming in manufacture of standard widths of draperies. Subsequent steps include sewing buckram material along the upper edge of the section of fabric. The partially completed drapery is then moved to a pleating machine. The pleat marks are then matched and the pleat is formed by a pleat forming machine or by hand, which shapes the pleat in accordance with the amount of material that has been allowed for forming the pleat, which in turn is determined by the pleat marking process. Then, the preformed pleat is stitched using a pleat sewing machine. The next step in the manufacture is to run the entire drapery through a fan folding machine which has interdigitated structures that form the folds so that the final fan folding process can be completed in a relatively wrinkle-free operation.
The foregoing pleat marking procedure and the fan folding procedure are very time-consuming, and add greatly to the cost of making draperies.
In efforts to overcome these problems, a large number of other drapery structures and manufacturing techniques have been developed. For example, draperies of different structures are manufactured under such trademarks as BEAUTY PLEAT, SPRING CREST, SNAP-A-PLEAT, and others. Each of these types of draperies has utilized different structures to create the "fullness" desirable for a drape, but in doing so, has encountered other problems, such as requiring specialized rods, springs, glides, etc., and has been subject to a number of other problems. Consequently, there has been a general lack of acceptance by the market of all types of draperies other than French pleat draperies.
To summarize, all prior approaches to manufacture of French pleated draperies involve measurement of the width of fabric for each drapery "by the panel", and the pleat marking operation is adjusted to produce an integral number of pleats for that drapery. This approach has resulted in excessive amounts of labor in the pleat marking operations and has resulted in waste of fabric, and has also resulted in some nonuniformity in the fullness and spacing of different draperies composed of different numbers of panels.
Accordingly, there clearly remains an unmet need for an improved, less expensive method for manufacturing draperies with French pleats, especially with equally spaced, equally sized pleats, regardless of the size of the window to be covered thereby.